Thirty unpaid hours a week: how Latter-day Saints find time for work, church and family

The Church publishes its own estimate of the load, which saves guessing. Its Newsroom page on lay leadership says members typically give 5 to 10 hours a week to a calling, and that leadership callings such as bishop or stake president take 15 to 30 hours. A bishop presides over a ward of 200 to 500 members and serves about five years. A stake president oversees several wards, 2,000 to 5,000 members in all, with a twelve-man high council to help, and serves about nine years. None of them is paid. Romney's 30-plus hours, then, were the top of the Church's own range, sustained for eight years, on top of a private equity firm.

Add the parts that are not callings. Tithing is a tenth of income and takes no time, but the Sunday block does, and so does the Monday night the Church asks families to keep clear. Members with children in the youth programme have weeknight activities on top. A conservative week for an active family with a father in a bishopric and a mother teaching a class runs to 20 hours before anyone has been to the temple.

The training for this starts earlier than most readers expect. A full-time missionary, who since October 6, 2012 can leave at 18, lives by a printed timetable: up at 6:30, half an hour of exercise, two hours of scripture study, language study for those abroad, out proselytising by 10, home by 9, planning and journal, lights out at 10:30. Two years of that, or 18 months for women, is the first sustained experience of a managed calendar most members ever have. The Church counted 78,596 full-time teaching missionaries at the end of 2025. Every one of them will come home knowing what a week looks like when every hour is assigned.

The pattern in the profiles is not that executives skipped church service until they were rich. It is that they took the heaviest callings in the middle of the heaviest years of their careers.

• J. Willard Marriott was president of the Washington Stake through the late 1940s and 1950s while Hot Shoppes went public (1953) and opened its first motel (1957).
• Jon Huntsman Sr. presided over the Washington D.C. Mission from 1980 to 1983, in the decade Huntsman Chemical was assembling itself, and later served as a stake president and, from 1996 to 2011, as an area seventy.
• Mitt Romney served in a bishopric in the early 1970s, was bishop of the Belmont, Massachusetts ward from 1981 to 1986, and stake president from 1986 to 1994, the Bain Capital years.
• Gary Crittenden, chief financial officer of American Express from 2000 to 2007 and of Citigroup from 2007 to 2009, has been a bishop, president of the Yorktown New York Stake and an area seventy.
• Clayton Christensen was a bishop, a counselor in the Massachusetts Boston Mission presidency and an area seventy from 2002 to 2009, the years around The Innovator's Dilemma and its sequels.
• Alan Ashton, co-founder of WordPerfect, served as bishop and stake president, then as president of the Canada Toronto West Mission from 2004 to 2007 and of the Provo Utah Temple from 2013 to 2016.
• Sheri Dew was a counselor in the Church's general Relief Society presidency from 1997 to 2002 while executive vice president, then chief executive from 2002, of Deseret Book.

The closest thing to a field study is Jeff Benedict's 2007 book The Mormon Way of Doing Business, which profiled eight executives, among them David Neeleman of JetBlue, Kevin Rollins of Dell, Gary Crittenden of American Express, Kim Clark of Harvard Business School and Clayton Christensen. BYU Studies' review summarised his finding on time in one sentence: they put family above the other demands, delegated what mattered less, and treated a stable home as the base for the career rather than its competitor. That is the standard answer and it is worth taking seriously, because it describes a method rather than a miracle. Romney's method, according to Wikipedia's account of his stake presidency, was to refuse overnight travel that might interfere with church responsibilities, which at a private equity firm in the late 1980s meant saying no to a good deal of deal-making. He also organised a team to handle the stake's financial and management problems, which is what a consultant does when he is handed a 4,000-member organisation with a dozen sites and no budget for staff. Christensen, who by his own account chose BYU over Harvard and Yale after making it a matter of prayer, spent 25 years in Scouting roles alongside the callings, and his July-August 2010 Harvard Business Review article, How Will You Measure Your Life?, argues that the allocation of a person's hours is a strategy decision that gets made by default if it is not made on purpose. Rollins told the Deseret News in March 2006 that he was "very big on focus" and did not think a company could carry more than three strategic initiatives at once; the men in Benedict's book seem to have run their weeks the same way, with church and family as two of the three. Dew, who took over a Deseret Book that Bloomberg Businessweek later called "flailing" in March 2002, had just finished five years in the Relief Society general presidency, a role that involves travel and speaking across the whole Church. Her own explanation, in the Wikipedia summary of her interviews, is that she is shy and that the work forced her to talk to people. None of these accounts is a time-and-motion study. They are what successful people say afterward, and they leave out the years that did not work.

Since 2018 the Church has cut the formal hours in three steps, each announced with a date. In October 2018 general conference, President Russell M. Nelson announced that the Sunday block would fall from three hours to two, effective January 2019: a 60-minute sacrament meeting followed by one 50-minute class, with Sunday School and the priesthood and Relief Society classes alternating week by week. The Church paired the cut with a home study curriculum, Come, Follow Me, issued in 47 languages, on the argument that instruction was moving from the meetinghouse to the kitchen table. Nelson's phrase for it, on October 6, 2018, was that "it is time for home-centered church, supported by what takes place inside our branch, ward, and stake buildings." Read as a management decision rather than a sermon, it shifted an hour a week from the institution to the household, which for a two-career family is not a small transfer.

On March 30, 2026, the Church announced a further adjustment, effective September 6, 2026: sacrament meeting stays at 60 minutes, but the second-hour classes now meet every week at 25 minutes each rather than alternating at 50. Paul V. Johnson, the Sunday School general president, gave the reason: "Gathering weekly in every class helps deepen gospel learning by connecting it more closely to personal and family study." The block is still two hours. The difference is that no class skips a week.

Monday night is older. The First Presidency's letter of April 27, 1915 asked families to hold a weekly home evening; Joseph Fielding Smith designated Monday in 1970 and asked local units to keep it free of other activities. Church buildings close on Monday evenings, and the handbook forbids meetings and baptisms after 6 p.m. that day. For an executive this is the one evening a week that the Church has, in effect, taken off his calendar on his behalf.

Nobody has measured the price. Everyone assumes there is one.

Hold the two things side by side: 15 to 30 unpaid hours a week for five to nine years, and a corporate job that itself runs past 50. Something gives, and the accounts above are quiet about what. The Church's own guidance on callings, quoted on its lay leadership page, is that "each calling should benefit the people who are served, the member, and the member's family," which is a standard rather than a schedule. Romney's biographers note his energy in the role; they do not report what Bain lost. The firm was founded in 1984 with Romney at its head, and his stake presidency began two years later, so the firm's first decade and his heaviest church years are the same decade. Crittenden's tenure as Citigroup's finance chief coincided with the firm cutting 75,000 jobs and $500 billion in assets, and no source says how many hours that left for a stake.

The safest claim is the modest one. A member who reaches the corner office has usually spent two decades running meetings, counselling strangers and managing a volunteer workforce without pay, on evenings and Sundays. Whether that is training or a tax depends on whom you ask, and the people best placed to answer, the spouses, are almost never quoted.